How Democracies Die: What History Tells Us about Our Future, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

So have we reached the point that a liberal democracy can only be considered a liberal democracy if it's state is controlled by (sufficiently) liberal politicians? Liberals have not cried "mea culpa" they've cried "not my fault it's the baddies fault", and have lazily equated Trump and Brexit with fascism. As a lifelong "Left" identifying person it's dispiriting to see that whilst being completely obsessed with othering narratives, most the Left is utterly unaware of its own.

...the refusal to recognise opponents as legitimate; the encouragement of violence; attempts to restrict media liberty and so on. America ticks all the boxes, too.

The authors may be right that it is party grandees that allow dictators to come to power, but that doesn’t explain why some of them also become popular. When you look at films of Hitler’s rallies, for example, the people attending don’t look as if they are there unwillingly.

The reviewer is a senior lecturer in English and Creative Writing, and in my opinion, has used those skills to create a rhetoric filled review that assumes that "Brexiteers and Trump" are a "threat to democracy". Long gone it seems are the disinterested impartial reviews of the past.

While Levitsky and Ziblatt offer some possibly useful critical analysis, I am mainly shocked by their apparent LACK of a historical and intellectual handle of the forces behind those events leading to collapses of democracies—all over but especially close to home in this hemisphere. In Chile for example, democracy did not die outright, it was killed in an organized and well-financed, if not desperate, way by a faction of the military, many of whom with close ties with the USA. The authors must have forgotten or not notice that, I suppose. If you look in the index under "Brazil" you will not find any mention of US assistance in the 1964 military coup there. While not an official politician, the name of Oliver North does not appear in the book. He had something to do with anti-democratic forces in action during the Reagan Era, a few decades back. I would say that the rather consistent pressure from both major parties and their views on electoral practice has left much of the nation not even voting, seeing that virtually any and all "3rd party" voices are systematically silenced or eliminated. And we haven't even touched on the electoral practices such as gerrymandering, the electronic voting machines, and so on which have dulled and reduced democracy in this nation for a long time. It is rarely mentioned in society and in this book. Resorting once again to t look in the index, the word "Duopoly" does not appear. Clearly the authors must see this term as a conspiratorial figment of a small class of ultra-liberal activists, and in no way a description of deep root elite-based collaboration between the two major parties on major issues. For these and other reasons I feel that Levitsky and Ziblatt really only touch on the questions involved in our acceptance of democracy's demise in the US, and seem not even to notice the many major well-organized internal efforts to smother democracy here.